Arthur Beck Pardee (July 13, 1921 – February 24, 2019) was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait[1] begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not affected by his work, which has advanced our understanding through theoretical predictions followed by insightful experiments. He is perhaps most famous for his part in the 'PaJaMo experiment' of the late 1950s, which greatly helped in the discovery of messenger RNA.[2] He is also well known as the discoverer of the restriction point, in which a cell commits itself to certain cell cycle events during the G1 cycle. He did a great deal of work on tumor growth and regulation, with a particular focus on the role of estrogen in hormone-responsive tumors. He is also well known for the development of various biochemical research techniques, most notably the differential display methodology, which is used in examining the activation of genes in cells. More recently he championed the acceptance and adoption of the conceptual review as a valuable approach to unearthing new knowledge from the enormous stores of information in the scientific literature. He died in February 2019 at the age of 97.[3]

While on sabbatical with Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod, Pardee was involved in an experiment that became known as PaJaMo.[5] The PaJaMo experiment, and later work with his student Monica Riley showed that protein synthesis from a gene could begin almost as soon as the gene entered an E.coli cell. Prior hypotheses around the translation of genetic information into proteins had focused on ribosomes, which turned over too slowly to enable the rapid synthesis seen in PaJaMo. This led to the hypothesis that yet another RNA species existed, messenger RNA.[6]

In the early 1970s Pardee identified that the cell cycle has a point in the 'G1' Phase where the cell, as it were, 'commits' to moving to the 'S' Phase. Pardee published on this so-called 'Restriction Point', sometimes called the 'Pardee Point', in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 (A restriction point for control of normal animal cell proliferation, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1974; 71:1286-90).